Slightly later than originally planned, Rob Zombie is finally about to get moving on his next horror opus **The Lords of Salem. There have been copious casting announcements from the man himself over the last few days. Here's a brief roundup.
House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects and the Halloweens all showed Zombie's penchant for casting recognisable genre faces and giving a shot in the arm to the careers of people - Sid Haig, Bill Moseley - who he wants to see more of. There's a similar principle at work here.
Dee Wallace (The Howling, ET, Cujo) is playing a self-help guru called Sonny. She worked with Rob before on the first of his Halloweens.
Veteran counter-culture character actor Bruce Dern, meanwhile, will be Francis Matthias, author of a book on the Salem Witch Trials that gets him into trouble.
Horror legend Billy Drago (he was also Frank Nitti, the guy Kevin Costner threw off the roof in The Untouchables) is Judge Samuel Mather, "a key player in the history of the Lords".
Meg Foster, who survived working with John Carpenter, Sam Peckinpah and Gary Busey (though not all at once), is Margaret Morgan, leader of a secret witch coven.
Ernest Thomas (Funny People, Everybody Hates Chris) is the manager at the radio station where the horror kicks off.
Jeff Daniel Phillips, who was in Faster with The Rock, and appeared twice in Zombie's Halloween II, works for Thomas.
And Torsten Voges (also in Funny People, and one of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski) is Count Gorgann, "lead singer of the Norwegian death metal band Leviathan the Fleeing Serpent".
An eclectically left-field cast so far then, for a peculiar sounding story involving resurrected Salem witches and haunted records. Zombie is teasing a partial period-setting along with the modern-day viscera, and promised **Empire earlier this year that The Lords of Salem will be "the bleakest of all my films." The plan was originally to shoot in the spring and edit in the winter, but the production, under the aegis of Oren Peli's Haunted Films, will now get underway later this month.